TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[alice wellintown]

Just kidding, of course. Alice could never write, even in German, as well
as you do, Kai.

And we all know that Alice is just a gadfly in disguise, the anti-Monte.

It is great irony that when Pointy attempts to deal with the historical
pathology, to maintain control,
he directs his efforts at the American Tyrone Slothrop (GR.144).

In a limited sense, P identifies this historical pathology with Mondaugan,
and the thus the cultural setting of pre-war Germany.

It is the "primitive *German*, God's poorest and most panicked creature"
(GR.465) or "the poor harassed *German* soul" (GR.426) whose
mind "for at last two centuries--since Leibniz" (GR.407) has
been strangely connected to "the rapid flashing of
successive stills to counterfeit movement....extended past
images to human lives" (GR.407).

This "*German* *sickness*" is connected with one of P's early interests and
concerns: the influence of "texts" (books, film, architecture, etc.) on the
young mind.

So Grover reads Tom Swift and Mathematics and tries to apply integration
(Math) to integration (the race problem, as it was called back then).

More on this later.

So we started looking into the two cultures, Snow and so forth, through a
polemical lens, surely, and there we identified this little man of science,
easy putty in the fascist state.


Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days
wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so
bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and think." Being
called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is
there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a
person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a
Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

The cultural prepares the expert, the leaders of Technopoly (Postmans), the
Man of Technic (Mumford).


In GR, Kurt Mondaugen, "One of these *German* mystics who grew up reading
Hesse, Stafan George, and Richard Wilhelm, is "ready to accept Hitler on
the basis of Demian-metaphysics
(GR.403) and Pokler was an extension of the Rocket, long before it was ever
built" (GR.402).

The *sickness* is also Christian-Capitalism (see Mumford on the clock and
the monastery, and as noted, Weber on the Monastic Life and the Calling),
and it infects and is in turn infected by the "*German*
mania for subdividing" (GR.448) which also infects and is infected by a
cultural linguistics
(Christian/sexual-homosexual, fetishistic language) obsessed with "name
giving (note the double irony of naming and the act of naming--Enzian and
Raketmensch), dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting
namer more hopelessly apart from named (GR.391, GR.366, GR.320-322).

Who divides with what? The new gods divide the new light from the new
darkness (AGTD).

The *German **sickness* is a Modern *sickness*, a pathology that P
satirizes as an epidemic of the *West*, but directs at an American audience
sitting in an American Theatre / Theater, an American reader and thinker,
that P admonishes by depicting the *German* male at puberty who rebels
against what he considers a "detestable Burgerlinchkeit" (GR.162) and who,
in the wake of his "Wandervogel idiocy" (GR.162),  reads Hesse and company
to become ready to accept Hitler on
the foundations of "Damian-metaphysics, a "Schwarmerei" that
soon degenerates into various forms of fanaticism for technological
specialization (GR.239) and fixed control which is rationalized by those
"folks in power" (GR.238).

In a broader sense, these woes are caused by the human mind--the
subjectivity, the inwardly trapped mind that has  separated what was once
whole or unified so that human experiences have become antagonistic.


Creation sees itself with both eyes
Open. Only our eyes are turned inwards,
Walls of circumvallation,
Against our own free beginning.
What it is like outside, we only know from glimpsing
The faces of animals. As soon as a child is born
We turn and force him so that he sees
All forms inside-out, not the real, that real
That shapes the animal's face--free from death.
Only we see it; free creation has its decline behind it
And before it, only God. And when it goes, it goes
Into eternity, as the fountains go.
We have never, not even for a day,
Looked into the world, into which the flowers
Eternally open. The world always is,
Not our narcissistic nothingness,
But the pure, the open, that one breathes in and out,
Always knowing and desiring. In stillness, children
Lose themselves in this pure air and tremble.
Or someone dies and yet remains.
Near to death one sees death no longer and
Perhaps stares out with huge animal eyes.
Lovers, were not the others, that pretended
To see, standing near you and amazed
When by mistake they peered out from
Behind themselves? . . . But we cannot get
Beyond our little selves and our small world returns.
Creation turns eternally and we see in its turning
The reflection of freedom
That is dark in us; or there, an animal,
Mute, looks out, peaceful through and through.
This is fate: to be opposed
And nothing more
and always opposed.
Were our kind of knowing in the beast,
The knowing that turns us into our other ways,
And his knowing in us,
We would know the turning.
For the beast's being is for her eternal
And ungrasped and without a glance towards her own
condition,
Altogether pure, like the passing of the world through her
eyes.
And where we see the future, she sees the all
And herself within it, healed forever.

Yet in the warm and waking beast
Trouble and sorrow are inner burdens.
She also bears what often this self of ours
Will overcome--the remembering,
As if it once was that which we strive
To approach, sadly, and the joining
Intolerably tender. Here all is distant
And there all close as breath. After our first home
We find the second cold and drafty.
O holiness, O tiny creation,
Remaining always in the womb that bears her.
O lucky gnats, still jumping into death
Even as they marry. The womb is all.
And see the edgy safety of the bird
Who breath and distance knows from birth,
As if he were the soul of an Etruscan,
Back from death, who has found a room
Lidded o'er with reclining figures.
And how dismayed he is--forced to fly
And torn from out the womb. Frightening
Himself, he flickers through the air, like a crack
Through a china cup. So is the trail of the bat
Through the porcelain of the evening.
And we, the audience, always, everywhere
Turning from all-in-all and never looking out.
It overflows from us. We bring it order.
But our things fall apart.
We sweep up our own debris and fall apart ourselves.

So who was it that turned us inwards, so that we,
And all we make, assume the posture
Of imminent departure? He stands upon the final rise,
>From which he sees our spreading lowlands.
He turns and stops and waits.
And here we live and take our leave. (DE VIII)


But with us, where we finally decide on one thing,
The other choice is always felt. We wear strife
Like a second skin. The lovers cannot always walk,
Arm in arm, along the borders
Of the world they have promised to find and to settle.
For a momentary sign, a reason for
Opposition will be prepared--laboriously;
We notice it because it is so meaningful
To us. We do not know the contour
Of feeling, only what facts it causes. (DE IV 9-18)

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre's strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. (SO I, III,
1-4) (GR.625-626)



On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 7:36 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> You sure read like Alice to me. But what do I know?
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
> lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 13.06.2013 00:38, Monte Davis wrote:
>>
>>  Is it possible that at the same time he is suspicious and minatory and
>> worried about science and technology (and he is, like so many other
>> writers),  he is also (like very few others in literary fiction) really *
>> interested** *in it? Attracted to it? Even fascinated by it? Concerned
>> to show us some real, important human values that come to us *through*,
>> even *because of*, math and science and technology?****
>>
>>
>> How math, science and technology can bring us "real, important human
>> values", I do not see. I'm not saying this polemically, and there are
>> certainly good things - antibiotics have been mentioned - about scientific
>> modernity. Or, as Jesse says when Walter shows him how to cook up the shit
>> right: "WOW ... *Science*!"  But "values"? How? Ain't modern science -
>> and I'm talking here about hard, or, as Paul Mackin puts it, "real science"
>> - a self-referential functional system completely unreachable for something
>> as old-fashioned as values of the "real, important human" kind? We do not
>> have to come to a consent on this. But I really would like to hear - and
>> please note that I'm not Alice - from you a detail or two on the criticism
>> on science one can doubtlessly find in Pynchon. The thing is that he's not
>> simply "worried about science and technology ... like so many other
>> writers"; to Pynchon the pitfalls of science-based control are a key issue.
>> I don't find this in, say, Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy. It's plausible
>> to say that Pynchon's attitude towards modern science's war against
>> ambivalence became more relaxed in the second phase of his work, but in the
>> first three novels the theme is central, imo. Pointsman makes his points,
>> Schoenmaker finds his clients. And Dr. Hilarious can continue his
>> concentration camp experiments under civil conditions in context of MK
>> Ultra. These motives - all based in the real history of the 20th century -
>> do unfold a fundamental criticism regarding modern science and its lack of
>> values. I'm not discussing here - though we might come to this - whether
>> the loss of human values is a necessary product of social differentiation,
>> as Luhmann ("Modernity has more advantages *and* more disadvantages than
>> any other society before") puts it, or whether this could be avoided by
>> different forms of political organization. Just that much: "Keep cool and
>> care!" won't do. That Pynchon is "attracted" to modern science is certainly
>> right; even after the successful publication of *V* he wanted to
>> complete his scientific education with a math grade from Berkeley. But, as
>> already said, how to get from Pynchon's fascination by science to any kind
>> of 'scientific value generation' to be found in the texts themselves, is
>> not clear to me. What I find instead, especially in *Gravity's Rainbow*,
>> is the tendency to connect the progress of science to deadly war
>> technology. Not only in the case of rockets or nuclear weapons, yet
>> regarding modern science as such. "There has been this strange connection
>> between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to
>> counterfeit movement for at least two centuries --- since Leibniz, in the
>> process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the
>> trajectories of cannonballs through the air" (GR, p. 407). It's not really
>> "the German mind", it's science ---
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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